Emergent Digital Practices

2024 is the year to celebrate:

10 years of ThingsCon!

Dear former speaker, workshop host, 

This year marks the 10th anniversary of ThingsCon. The first ThingsCon was organized in Betahaus in Berlin in the spring of 2014, and later that year, the first Amsterdam edition took place at the offices of info.nl (see Peter Bihr visiting Amsterdam above). 

It deserves a special edition this December, and we are planning a celebrative one. We will send newsletters to our community, but we would like to contact our former speakers and workshop hosts from the last ten years (yes, that is you, too!).  

Save the date We keep this short but want to share the date for our two-day conference: 12 and 13 December. We plan to create the usual mix of inspiring talks, engaging workshops, and connecting exhibitions, including a specially commissioned exhibition connected to our theme. And there will be a party, too! 

We hope you will join us!

Our theme: Generative Things Looking back at the last decade of ThingsCon and where we are now, a look into the next decade will discuss the relationship with things. To initiate a debate, we frame these new things as Generative Things. Find more on the theme on this page. 

Invitation to contribute: RIOT After a couple of years, one of the activities we are shaping is restarting a new collection of articles bundled in the RIOT publication, the State of Responsible IoT. The last edition was published in 2020 and deserves a new one! 

Like other years, we invite contributors for articles, aiming for an inspiring mix of academic and practice-rooted articles. Articles can be new works or adapted versions of earlier articles. Check earlier editions to get the feel. 

Engage!

We hope you will engage with the theme and think with us to make another memorable edition! You can contact us by replying to this email or connecting directly with one of our team members. 

You can also reach out if you have ideas for other collaborations, special tracks, workshops, etc. We are looking forward to a special edition!!!

Team ThingsCon

TiL (click to go to the thread, which probably has more interesting tidbits I missed).

Bonus:

In addition to the print terminology stuff: the visual shorthand icons and ad graphics for something about writing are still often pen-nibs, fountain pens and typewriters…

…while graphics of a monitor, keyboard and mouse remain visual shorthand for computing…

…even though most writers now use monitor /  keyboard / mouse or even laptop / touchpad.

In addition, headers for “this blog / website is about writing” are often in one of the many imitation typewriter fonts complete with smudges, or just Courier.

The start and end call icons on most / all smartphones is still the handset of a classic desk telephone, and sometimes the open-app icon is a complete phone.

The term “hang up” for “end the call” refers to something even older - one of these…

And of course the Save icon is indeed a 3½ inch floppy disc.

Why it wasn’t a 5¼ floppy is a mystery. The icon version is just as distinctive.

Also, why various OP updates never changed “Save” to the graphic of a CD / DVD or flash drive is another mystery, and nowadays a Save icon should probably be a cartoon cloud.

Paul Pfeiffer “Desiderata” 2004. Digital video loop, viewable here at 28:37.

I wrote this essay for the “future of fandom” issue of Transformative Works and Cultures.  It is written as a design fiction, which is a cousin to fanfiction in the same way that speculative fiction is - it imagines a possible future.

It traces fandom’s past, through its present, and finally what the future might hold for a fandom community that continues to “own the servers.” 

“As Henry Jenkins said many years ago, ‘Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk’ (Harmon 1997). We may not own the myths, but owning the servers is also a form of damage repair, where we’ve reasserted the values of our community. The future of fandom is particularly bright because of how far we’ve come, the path we’ve taken to get here, and the amazing things we’ve built along the way.”

I’d love to hear what you think!

In other words: All is not lost. The result of this happening ten years ago with LiveJournal was OTW and AO3. 

I’ve wondered for a few years now what the endgame would be for this odd site: the black sheep of the social media venues. Tumblr is, and always has been, completely un-”monetizable”—i have no idea how it makes any money whatsoever .

But at its best, it’s the last throwback to the internet that I knew and loved in the 1990s. A weird, scitter-scatter, gonzo Wild West sort of place. Ironically its Yahoo acquisition was what truly reduced it to a backwater, a terminally uncool site that was always said to be “dying” by media outlets with a habit of firing most of their staff employees before Christmas. This meant that, quietly, it became a place where marginalized people could thrive.

I’ve come to appreciate its complete uselessness. Apart from El Sandifer, Matt Maxwell, Sylvia K and a few others, I have utterly no idea who’s on here, who follows me, if anyone even reads the stuff I put up here on very rare occasion. It’s the dead channel. Over the years, it’s been the place when in the absolute depths of despair I’ll put up,say, a video of the Beatles “Help!”’ and hope that someone sees it who needs to. Like a lighthouse sending out a signal to some ship out there in the dark..

I’ve come to like the weird rando anonymous questions I get. I like the feeling of this being a shopping mall with maybe 4 stores left- standing–a vaping shop, a sad video arcade, a fabric store, and a place you can buy games and phone accessories (for an out-of-date phone).

You get the feeling some bean-counter finally got around to “the Tumblr problem” and now has big plans to finally Monetize this dump in some ridiculous, seriously doomed way. This censorship initiative is the first wave—what will likely soon come is a more aggressive enforcement on visual/audio copyright, which will wipe out like..70% of all posts? Good luck ,baby.

My last Rothko painting post was just flagged as adult content, showing you how well these bots work. Sigh.